A growing need exists in the fleet telematics and auto insurance industries to monitor driver behavior and vehicle parametric data in real time. Current telematics systems are increasingly relying on multiple sensors to provide real time data. This data is recorded and analyzed to better understand driver behavior, vehicle performance in different environmental conditions, and vehicle maintenance needs. All of this information allows users to assign insurance risk more accurately. The collected data is often used during post accident analysis to determine driver behavior and vehicle performance immediately prior to the accident. To provide the highest level of usefulness, the collected data used in the analysis from all sensors must be correctly time tagged and synchronized with each other.
Since providing reliable and highly accurate time can be expensive to implement, many telematics systems rely on the universal clock time provided by global positioning system (GPS) satellites. The data received from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) sensors typically contain a time stamp from a GPS satellite for when the data was measured. Various types of unpredictable delays may occur, however, prior to a telematics system receiving and/or recording GNSS sensor data. As a result, the universal time stamp contained in the data may not accurately correspond to the time the data is recorded by the telematics system. Therefore, associating the time the data is recorded with the time referenced in the universal time stamp may result in potentially significant errors due to the delay, particularly when comparing the GNSS sensor data to data from other sensors without universal time stamps.
Therefore, a need exists for synchronizing data across multiple sensors and tagging all sensor data with a common, reliable, universal time.